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Fate Of The Furious Review

What The Fate Of The Furious Can Teach Us About Family

PrintAscher Robbins

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We believe it was the great Echo Park poet Dominic Toretto who once said, “The problem with putting your foot on a tiger’s neck is you can never let it up.” In The Fate of the Furious, Dom, who’s still living his life a quarter-mile at a time, offers that murky metaphor as a threat to a sexy hacker with dreadlocks who talks like she’s an admin on brainyquote.com. Why do we bring it up? Because this silly tiger quip, a frenetic jailbreak sequence, a submarine shitfight, a vehicular monsoon, and Jason Statham partaking in a shootout while cradling a baby are the only things that can stupefy you long enough to make you forget the overarching theme of the Fast franchise: family. In case you do get caught up in the razzle dazzle, don’t fret, as the characters mention the importance of family at every given opportunity throughout this eighth Fast instalment (the only one where ‘Fast’ doesn’t feature in the title).

Here’s what we learnt about the concept of family from The Fate of the Furious.

Inevitably, a loved one will... go rogue

With the crazy pace of modern life and the potential for your daughter and her friend to be kidnapped in Europe and sold into sex slavery, it’s no surprise people go rogue these days. Just like Neeson in Taken, Dom does the action movie double-whammy of going rogue AND off the grid – all in the name of family, of course. It really does make you think: Would I bring the world to the brink of nuclear holocaust for my family? Rhetorical question. If you had to ponder it, you aren’t truly riding with mi familia.

Leave big, bald bros to settle their own differences

OK, so if you’re ever at a family brunch and you have relatives who resemble Jason Statham and Dwayne Johnson in both physique and demeanour and they begin exchanging swoll banter about toothbrushes in bums (context probably helps with that gibe), just let them have at it. Truth is, they’ll probably spend more time moving their jaws than swinging at them. One of the real letdowns of Fate is that these brothers in jacked arms decide to put their differences aside instead of trying to put jumbo wrenches into each other’s skulls. Although, they do call the truce in order to find their fellow big, bald brother, because: family.

A flaming car explodes the way to respect

Any Cuban knows this, as demonstrated in the opening chapter of the movie: a heated street race through Havana, where, on the surface, it seems like a schmick car is at stake, but what Dom is really trying to do, as he leaps from his too fast, too fuego jalopy right before it combusts, is show his cousin how to earn respect… a quarter mile at a time.